I’m sure you’ll all be happy to hear this… We didn’t have any classes today, so I actually had some time to pull myself together!! You have no idea how much better I’m feeling mentally. There’s not too much to report about today (sitting at my computer accomplishing things doesn’t make for the most interesting stories).

One thing I haven’t talked much about is our morning runs. Aside from team week last week, we’ve (we being Debbie, Julie, and me) been consistently running Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and just this week we added in extra Tuesday, Thursday workouts. It’s nice to have some time to clear my head in the mornings, plus then I can eat cookies every day and not feel bad about it.

The sky on our way out this morning.

The running is always a bit of an adventure. We just run around the neighborhood, and that leaves us with the same choice each day at the first intersection: left, straight, or right? Each direction has its pros and cons.

Left is okay, but you have to run past a chicken farm for the first block. There are inevitably some of the worst smells ever during that part of the run. Otherwise, it’s almost totally fine, but it’s hard to get past the horribleness of the beginning smells.

Straight is fun, but last time (the only time…) we went that way, there were tons of dogs at the end of the street. There are stray dogs all over the place here, and I’m not keen on getting attacked by a crazy dog. No matter which way we run, we always come across stray dogs. Some of them are perfectly friendly, but others are mildly terrifying. We stop running when they start following or growling at us (annoying in the middle of a workout) and try to ignore them so they don’t feel threatened. Debbie makes this “CH!” sound that they apparently don’t like, and sometimes it does make them leave us alone. A few times, we’ve picked up rocks just in case, and they usually get the picture and go away. It’s pretty annoying though, so I’m not the biggest fan of running straight.

Right is definitely the best option, even though there are some speed bumps to go over that require you to actually pick your feet up off of the ground. The smells aren’t quite as bad as they are to the left, and there are always stray dogs, but not as many as straight. I don’t like going the same way every time, so we do sometimes go left and deal with the horrible chicken farm smell. I bet you had no idea that running could be such a dilemma, huh?

Debbie and I did take a little time to accomplish class-related things this afternoon and went to stock up on paper clips and solder for the robots. We also had an exciting quest to search for bottles and plastic caps that could be used for beetle shells on our robots. Some of the stuff we ended up with is a bit random and weird, but there’s only so much we can do. We’ll get to decorating on Friday, so that should be a whole new fun and exciting adventure.